Upward Mobile-ity

When it comes to small spaces, nothing conjures up images of design-impaired living like the words "mobile home." Add to that a reputation for flimsy construction, and the bad rap seems well deserved.

Yet when architecture professor Michael Hughes talks about trailers and the traditional urban trailer park, he sees another picture: affordable, small-scale homes in a high-density neighborhood. "Mobile homes came into being as a low-cost housing solution, serving that niche in between an apartment or condo and a standard suburban home," says Hughes. "Their typical design, however, has been fundamentally flawed, with structural and spatial issues."

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Hughes was given the chance to retool a trailer into his vision of a well-designed, budget-friendly residence when a defunct 1960s-era unit in Boulder's Mapleton Mobile Home Park was donated to the design/build architecture program at the University of Colorado. (Hughes has since relocated to the University of Arkansas.) With a leaking roof, rotting wood and pitted metal siding, the two-bedroom, 489-square-foot unit had little left to salvage. Since local zoning codes required that dwellings within a mobile-home park must remain portable, the team kept the original steel chassis and sent the rest of the dilapidated structure to the scrap yard.

Determined to build the trailer back better and slightly bigger than before, Hughes and his class worked with structural engineers to devise a substantial system of concrete tie-downs to tether the unit to the site and withstand high winds. They added cross-bracing and metal columns for further support, which allowed them to extend steel tubing beyond the original frame to create thicker, insulated walls and gain a few more feet of living space.

Photo: Michael Deleon

In what Hughes refers to as the team's big design move, they maximized the trailer's 25- by-75-foot lot by including a deck that could be disassembled if mobility became an issue. "We oriented the interiors toward this outdoor living room, which has a covered roof and feels like part of the house," says Hughes. "In a small space, if you can increase your view and access to the outdoors, your place feels larger."

Keeping sustainability and budget constraints in mind, Hughes and his students utilized salvaged materials whenever possible—redwood for the deck came from a resale source, and interior partitions were created from old solidcore doors and scrap veneer plywood donated by a local cabinetmaker. Readily available and affordable materials filled in the rest, including butcher-block kitchen counters and utility-grade oak flooring.

Hughes says his class spent about $36,000 from grants. Donations of supplies and time plus the students' free labor made it possible to accomplish the rehab. He estimates that a similar project with no funding could run as high as $140,000.

"It's the trailer component that jacks up the costs," says Hughes. "Without that, building a small-scale structure like this would be about 40 percent less expensive." But until cities update their zoning codes to allow permanent affordable homes to be put in the place of mobile units, he notes, this issue will continue to exist.

In the meantime, he's comfortable with the fact that he and his students carried out their vision of what a trailer could become. "Instead of making the argument verbally," says Hughes, "we thought we'd show them what's possible."